


Strike the right note

by keeptheearthbelow



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Gen, taking liberties with DC's weather because it would actually be either 60 degrees or sleeting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-16
Updated: 2013-12-16
Packaged: 2018-01-04 19:37:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,773
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1084926
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/keeptheearthbelow/pseuds/keeptheearthbelow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A baker on his daily commute crosses paths with a busker who expresses herself better in song than in words. Written for the "Prompts in Panem" Holiday Challenge.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Strike the right note

Peeta sees her for the first time during the week before Thanksgiving, on the steps outside the Metro one evening. The thing that catches his attention first is the dog, actually — a small, alert, tawny dog with a buckled red vest stating that it’s a PTSD service dog. There’s a logo with a canine silhouette superimposed on the flag. He looks up at the veteran sitting next to the dog and is somehow surprised to see that it’s a young woman inside the bulky camo jacket.

She’s doing the thousand-yard stare across the street, not blinking at the speeding traffic or pedestrians. Her arms are wrapped around a guitar but she isn’t playing it, and the battered guitar case in front of her is empty.

He slows down a bit, trying not to loom over her, and fishes the change out of his pocket to drop in. As he’s leaning down he sees more clearly how worn and thin she looks. He realizes he has something a little better than coins to offer and sets down the bakery bag too. Then he heads down into the Metro and home.

Once back aboveground and away from exhaust, the air has the smoky smell of fallen leaves, along with an icy edge. He wonders about the young woman. She must be getting some services, if she has the dog. Maybe that’s what brought her to DC. But he wonders how long she’s been back, and if she has anywhere to go at night.

The next morning, she’s in the Metro station. The dog is sprawled beside her, and she’s playing her guitar and she’s singing. It’s Joni Mitchell’s “Little Green.” She isn’t playing all that loudly, but in the echoing corridor of the station, the music reverberates.

She has a fantastic voice, a silvery alto, lower than Joni Mitchell in the original but not as low as Joni Mitchell in her later years. The commuters’ heads turn to have a look at the source of this voice. Peeta stands and watches her through the rest of the song. Occasionally somebody approaches and drops coins in her guitar case. She looks wistful but happy.

At the end of the song, he claps softly, trying just to let her know he appreciated it. She glances at him, and he’s surprised by the change in her expression. Closed off. Her eyes slide away. She thumbs a few chords, not looking at him.

He was hoping to hear her play another. On the other hand, he does need to get to the cafe. He drops a bill in the guitar case and walks away.

As winter closes in he figures out her schedule, or at least which days she’s likely to be there in the morning, because evenings turn out to be a rarity. Maybe she’s just a morning person. She looks happy while she’s singing, but only while she’s singing, as if it’s a performance that she can’t quite pull off full-time. She has a long dark braid. She has a repertoire he likes — Loretta Lynn, Carolina Chocolate Drops, Josh Ritter, Joan Baez.

On days she might be around, he makes extra sure to have change in his pockets to leave with her. He starts choosing whatever keeps the best out of the day’s surplus to bring home, so that he can make sure she has something decent to eat in the morning. A couple times he just makes a sandwich before leaving his place and wraps it up in a bakery bag, somehow under the impression that a gift that looks less personal is more acceptable. Once, when he sets down the bakery bag next to her guitar case, she stops “Hallelujah” in the middle of a verse and pounces on the bag. He hovers for a second, trying desperately not to ask, and then heads to the escalators. He looks back to see that she has torn the ham-and-cheese croissant carefully in two and is giving half to her dog.

He doesn’t see her for a couple days after that. Then, he comes up out of the Metro into the pre-dawn darkness, thinking about nothing but the light snow that has started to fall, and hears a guitar on the sidewalk behind him. It leaves off mid-phrase — he doesn’t catch what it was — and he hears a few quiet words of a different song. “I want to thank you, thank you.” The melody continues on without her voice. Natalie Merchant — that takes him back. He turns around. Her eyes catch his, just briefly. He offers her a smile. She stops playing and drops a hand to the dog, which is leaning against her leg. Then she continues on with the previous song.

The next morning she’s there on the steps outside again, idly thumbing chords on the guitar without singing, looking at the snow. It’s illuminated by the white Christmas lights recently strung on the trees in the little park across the street, as well as the amber streetlights. He pauses. Then has a seat a few feet from her.

He waits a minute to see if this is okay — with both her and the dog — while peacoat-clad commuters shuffle their paths around him, quietly grouchy.

“I, um.” Lord almighty, why is this hard all of a sudden? He thought he had some idea what to say. Her fingers keep moving quietly across the guitar strings. There’s a hole in the seam of one of her fingerless gloves.

He holds out the bakery bag with the logo facing her. It gives him something to hide behind. “This is my cafe. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in. Not that I’m trying to, um, brag. But if you like the food okay, and if you want to stop in and try something warm for a change, the address is right there on the bag, and you’d be welcome.”

The dog stands up and scoots around her, so that it’s now between them. It watches him, while she eyeballs the bag, as if the sight has become unfamiliar.

The dog pads forward to sniff his hand and wrist. Then further forward to nose around his face. He holds still, knowing he shouldn’t touch the dog because it’s a service animal. The young woman is now staring at her dog.

The dog sighs in his face and comes back to her and lies down, cuddled against her. She’s looking at Peeta out of the corner of her eye.

“I guess Buttercup approves.”

It’s the first thing he’s heard her say instead of sing.

He replies, with a fervent hope that Buttercup is the dog’s name and not some odd way she refers to herself, “Well, Buttercup can drop by on his own if he wants to.”

She laughs. Just a quick exhale that creates a burst of condensation in front of her, but it was a laugh. He looks at her in amazement.

He sets down the bag on the concrete between them, not sure what to do next. After a moment, she pulls it toward her and looks inside. Hesitantly, she pulls out one of the sugar cookies sitting on top.

“Not exactly breakfast,” he murmurs. “But I don’t think they’re half bad so I thought I’d pass them on.”

She examines the cookie, tilting it toward the light. Pulls out another one and looks at it. “It’s your bakery?”

“Uh huh,” he says, not sure where she’s going.

“Are you the baker?”

“Oh. Yes.”

“Are each of the snowflakes different?”

Both the cookies in her hands are iced sugar cookies, both snowflakes. “Oh man. I do them by hand, so I can’t really help that they turn out different. I mean, I start from the same few designs.”

She inspects the first cookie a moment longer, then breaks off a piece and puts it in her mouth. Only after she swallows does she nod in approval. She places another piece in front of her dog. Then, tentatively, she breaks off a third piece and hands it to him.

He accepts. They share the cookie there in the dark morning, with the snow falling gently around them. The concrete steps are cold but this doesn’t seem terribly important. Commuters continue to brush past.

She licks the crumbs off her fingertips and positions them back over the frets. He takes that as a dismissal and stands up. She looks up at him, her gaze direct. He feels a little dizzy. He wants to say bye and hello and a hundred questions all at once. “My name’s Peeta, by the way.”

She glances between him and the cafe logo. “Peeta Mellark.”

“Yep.”

She hesitates before saying, “Katniss Everdeen.”

“Pleasure to meet you.”

She says in the direction of the guitar, “We’ll see.”

↔

Katniss never does come by the cafe, though he still sees her in the station. In the week before Christmas, she switches to carols. Just the solemn-sounding ones, though, apparently, and maybe just instrumentals. He hears what he assumes to be “Greensleeves” as he’s coming up from the tracks, but it turns out to be “What Child Is This?” because then she plays “O Little Town of Bethlehem” and “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming.”

She takes a break for a sip from the disposable coffee cup beside her, and he comes over and puts a bill in her guitar case. “Not feeling the cheer part of Christmas cheer?”

She stares at him. “You’ve been listening to me for awhile now.”

“Um.” He tries to figure out how to recover. “Yeah. I mean, I admit, I’d be pretty surprised to hear you playing Rudolph or Winter Wonderland.”

She holds still, her expression cool.

He thinks about this. The bakery, the sugar cookies, even the fact that he owns more than one winter coat, they make up the information she has about him and they don’t really paint a complete picture. “I just meant to make conversation. I have no problem with sad Christmas songs. Look, if it helps at all … my favorite Christmas song is ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.’”

She narrows her eyes. “Frank Sinatra or Judy Garland?”

He breathes out, relieved. “Judy Garland.”

She nods, slowly, like he’s passed a test. “Okay.”

He gives her a minute, but she doesn’t shoo him away and the dog is relaxed. Taking another chance, he says, “What’s yours?”

“My favorite?” She looks startled. Considers it carefully. “O Holy Night.”

He can’t help a grin. “You would sound amazing on that.”

She looks down. “Not really a guitar song.”

“Vocal solo, then.”

“No,” she says firmly, but he thinks there’s a bit of a smile.

As she takes another sip of coffee, he finds himself saying, “Do you choose songs that tell something about your own story?” Apparently he’s just going to keep swinging for the fences here.

The dog stretches, bumping both their legs. She doesn’t look at him. “Sometimes.”

“Seems that way. I’m sure it isn’t your whole story, but I just wondered.”

She looks up, with a prickly, guarded expression. “Speaking of stories. Why does my dog take an interest in you?”

He swallows. A pry for a pry — fair enough. “I probably could have used a dog like that at some points earlier in my life. Maybe that’s why.”

She scowls. “Not for the same reasons as me.”

“No. But I get it.”

“You’re assuming.”

“Well, yes. But I have to say, I’d really like to know you better, instead of assuming. I’d like to hear why you play the songs you do.”

She holds his eyes, fingers moving very quietly across the guitar. After a moment, he recognizes “I Hung My Head.” She asks, “Would you really?”

“Yeah. I would.”

She studies him. “What song would I play about your reasons, then?”

He is not surprised that this question makes him acutely aware of the time and how he really ought to get to work like all the people rushing through the tunnel just steps away. What does surprise him is that he is not instantly handing her any of his standard lines for people he doesn’t know well. “I Hung My Head” continues to thrum from her guitar.

After a minute, he says, “Do you know ‘Janie’s Got a Gun’?”

She doesn’t miss a beat on the strings, even though he sees in her expression that she knows the song. And to her immense credit, she doesn’t look him up and down as if picturing something. Her eyes just go sad. They watch each other.

Eventually, he says, “Johnny Cash might be costing you tips, here.”

She smiles, surprising him again, and flattens her hand over the frets. “He doesn’t usually.”

He tries to return the smile. “Maybe we should go back to Christmas carols.”

She shrugs. “You can pet Buttercup if you want.”

He doesn’t know whether to take the offer seriously. “You’ll allow that?”

She nods. So he crouches down and scrunches up his fingers in the dog’s ruff. The dog attempts to lick his ear. Above them, Katniss strums a few chords and starts singing “Still, Still, Still.”

As she’s closing the carol, he gets out his wallet and puts a twenty in the guitar case. He thinks he left something earlier, but he is certain that he’s cost her tips. He also finally gets the package of panettone out of his jacket pocket and sets that down too. He stands up, they wave at each other, and he goes on his way.

↔

She finally shows up at the cafe on Christmas Eve. When he goes to lock the front, she’s out there, sitting on one of the tree planters, illuminated by the streetlights. She has procured a piece of tinsel to tie around the dog’s collar and it’s glittering in the breeze.

He holds the door open. “Come in. Are you hungry?”

She shakes her head. “I just wanted to say bye. I’m headed out for a while and, um, didn’t want you to worry.”

He’s touched. So much so that he doesn’t really know how to react. “Will you come back?”

“Probably. I, um. I wanted to work a bit. On things. About what … we talked about the other day. I was sort of thinking. Because you make it sound like things can get better.” She stops and sucks in a breath. It’s the most he’s ever heard her say in one go.

He lets the door close behind him. Says, as gently as he knows how, “Yeah. I think they can.”

After a minute without her saying anything, he’s getting glad he didn’t come out here without a coat, and he says, “Are you sure you don’t want to come in?”

“Yeah, just —” She looks at her guitar case like she’d forgotten it was in her hands. Sets it down and starts undoing the clasps. “I had a present for you.”

“You — wow. Katniss, you really don’t have to.”

She ignores this and deliberately closes the case before she puts the guitar strap around her shoulders and stands up, looking both formal and awkward. She keeps her head bowed as she starts the opening chords of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” but she meets his eyes when she starts singing.

He’d liked the song even before he heard the Judy Garland version. But that’s the original lyrics, and — well. It’s different in that it’s pretty definite about next year being better than this one. The most striking variation is that there’s no _hang a shining star upon the highest bough_. Instead, it’s _Until then we’ll have to muddle through somehow_.

Which is pretty much the way life works, in his view, and so it’s the most realistic Christmas song he knows. And it’s no less hopeful for that.

Katniss continues watching him for a few beats after the song ends. Then Peeta realizes his eyes have welled up and he looks away, a little embarrassed. He rubs his eyes and laughs. “Thank you,” he says, looking back to her.

She seems to have been waiting for him to say something, maybe to know that he accepted the gift. She crouches and puts the guitar away. The dog pads back and forth between them.

She gets back to her feet, looking pleased. “Okay,” she tells him. “I’ll come back.”

“I’ll be here,” he says. “Good luck.” He holds out his hand, hoping to strike the right note. She looks at it and puts her hand in his. It’s the first time they’ve touched. He can feel the calluses on her fingertips. They smile at each other.


End file.
